


Thistle Whistles

by telperion_15



Category: Primeval
Genre: Adventure, Creatures, Gen, Loch Ness Monster, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-11
Updated: 2012-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:06:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telperion_15/pseuds/telperion_15
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The team go looking for the most famous prehistoric visitor of them all...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thistle Whistles

**Author's Note:**

> For those people who haven't heard of the kids' TV show I reference in this fic, [here](http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gxjqMZd-BVE) is a link to a video of the title sequence of said show.

“There’s no question that _Jurassic Park 3_ was better than _The Lost World_!”

“Okay, I’ll give you that. But we’re agreed that the original movie is the best, right? I mean, nothing tops the vibrating glass of water – gives me the shivers every time.”

“And the bit with the velociraptors in the kitchen…”

“Oh my god! Gave me nightmares for months!”

“Really?”

“I was nine! Still an awesome movie, though…”

“You have got to be joking!”

As one, Connor and Stephen turned towards Nick, shocked that he would dare to disparage the greatest dinosaur movie of all time. Then they realised that he wasn’t talking to them at all, but was still on the phone to Claudia. Who, by the looks of it, had just delivered some very unwelcome news.

“Are you serious?” Nick continued disbelievingly. “You really want us to go there?” There was a pause, presumably while Claudia tried to convince Nick that, yes, she did want him to go wherever it was it he _didn’t_ want to go. Then Nick sighed in defeat. “Okay, I’ll call Abby. Stephen and Connor are already with me. But I have a condition – you’re coming too.”

Stephen and Connor heard Claudia’s outraged “what?!” even from the other side of the room.

“No arguments, Claudia. We’ll see you there tomorrow.”

He hung up, and then looked at Stephen and Connor.

“Claudia thinks there might be a new anomaly. She wants us to check it out.”

Stephen looked confused. “Might be? Why only ‘might be’? What evidence does she have?”

“An increase in sightings,” replied Nick.

“So where is it?” asked Connor.

Nick sighed again. “You’re not going to believe this… I almost don’t want to say.”

“Hang on,” said Stephen. “You said an _increase_ in sightings. That means there have been sightings before.”

Nick nodded, looking every inch the exasperated academic. “That’s right,” he confirmed. “There have been plenty of sightings in the area, some dating back decades, even centuries.”

“Oh my god!” Connor sounded like he’d just been handed the Holy Grail of dinosaur research. “You don’t mean…?”

“Yep…”

“But that’s fantastic!”

“What? I don’t get it,” Stephen complained.

Connor couldn’t hold it in any more. “We’re going to Loch Ness!”

*   *   *   *   *

Late in the afternoon of the next day, Abby was sat on a rock on the shores of Lock Ness, staring out across the murky water and trying to convince herself that she really did agree with Cutter about the ridiculousness of them being here, and not with Connor about the excitement of it.

Because, despite the fact that the sensible side of her brain wanted nothing more than to go home, or at least to the pub down the road where the others had decamped to, the more open-minded side was intrigued and captivated by the mystery of the loch and its possible prehistoric inhabitant. And besides, didn’t the existence of the anomalies at least strongly suggest that there might really be something more to the centuries of monster sightings than just hoaxes and wild imaginings?

It was no good – she had to admit it. She agreed with Connor. This was exciting.

And speak of the devil…

Connor sat down beside her. Glancing around, Abby saw that Cutter, Stephen, and Claudia had also come back with him, and were all staring at the loch as if they wished it would just dry up.

“Seen anything yet?” Connor asked. He had wanted to stay by the loch-side all afternoon, but Cutter had dragged him and his laptop off to the nice warm pub to consult about what the ‘monster’ might possibly be.

“Nothing,” Abby replied. She looked out over the water again. “You know, what we really need are some thistle whistles,” she mused. “Then we could call it right to us.”

“Oh my god, _The Family Ness_!” exclaimed Connor. “I loved that show when I was a kid. It was what convinced me that the Loch Ness Monster really existed.”

“Figures,” Cutter muttered behind them, but they ignored him.

Connor hummed a bit of the theme tune from the eighties cartoon. “How did the song go again?”

“Something about bagpipes at the beginning, wasn’t it?” said Abby. She was amused, but wholly unsurprised that Connor had also seen _The Family Ness_. She’d been reminded of the show the second they’d arrived at the loch, and was only surprised that she’d brought it up before he had.

Connor hummed a bit more, and Abby felt the lyrics from the song starting to take shape in her head.

“Got it!” said Connor suddenly. “ _McTout blows on his bagpipes_ …” he began hesitantly.

Abby joined in, the words suddenly flooding back. “… _whilst Elspeth and Angus watch those notes go floating across the waves_.”

They were in the swing of it now, and the rest of the song came easily.

“ _Ferocious-Ness appears at once,  
_ _And grabs a note or two for lunch,  
_ _And the whole of the Family Ness is not too far behind.  
_ _Sporty-Ness leaps over him,  
_ _Turns upside-down and dives back in,  
_ _And the beautiful Lovely-Ness shows she’s the kissing kind!  
_ _Eyewit-Ness comes up for air,  
_ _And taking notes without a care,  
_ _He turns with a crash and a bash and a splash  
_ _To the Family Ness…_ ”

As the song ended they collapsed in laughter. “I always loved Ferocious-Ness, eating the musical notes,” gasped Connor.

“I liked Sporty-Ness, with his stripy t-shirt,” said Abby. “Probably because I was such a tomboy.”

Nick cleared his throat loudly. “When you two have quite finished…”

“Yeah, you’ve probably scared any creatures away with that performance,” added Stephen, looking amused. “There’s probably not a thistle whistle in the land that could call up a monster right at this moment – you’ve deafened them all.”

“Sorry,” muttered Connor, not looking sorry at all.

“Yeah, sorry,” echoed Abby, who was trying not to start laughing again. Making a valiant effort to keep a straight face, she addressed Cutter. “Did you and Connor work anything out?”

“It’s probably a _plesiosaur_ ,” said Connor promptly, before Cutter could answer. “That fits in with what most of the sightings have described – the long neck, flippers, etcetera.”

“And how are we going to find it?”

“We don’t know,” said Claudia. “But since we don’t have any thistle whistles…” – she put a withering amount of sarcasm on the words – “…we’ll have to come up with something else."

“Well, we can’t really search the whole loch, can we?” said Stephen. “I mean, it’s over twenty miles long, and over two-hundred metres deep in some places. There’s no way we’d be able to find the anomaly site. And that’s even supposing we can pick up the magnetic fluctuations when they’re underwater anyway.”

“What we really need,” mused Cutter, “is a way of attracting the creature to us. Then we could find some way to track it back to the anomaly.”

There was silence for a few seconds. Then…

“Thistle whistles!” exclaimed Connor.

Claudia sighed exasperatedly. “Do you think you could stop acting the idiot for just a few minutes and actually try to be useful?” she asked angrily.

“Sorry. But just hear me out. In the cartoon, the kids attracted the monsters using sound. Why can’t we try the same? Use sonar or something – see if it comes to investigate.”

“It might work,” said Stephen. “We’d still have to sail up and down the loch a few times, but we wouldn’t have to cover every square inch of it. And we’d probably have to try a lot of different sonar frequencies to have any success. The whole thing still depends a lot on luck, really.”

“Well, has anyone got a better idea?” said Connor stubbornly.

Another silence.

“Let’s give it a go,” said Nick finally. “We really haven’t got any other options at this point. Stephen, you look into hiring a boat. Claudia, can you get hold of some sonar equipment from somewhere? Connor and Abby, you can help me fine tune the details.”

*   *   *   *   *

Connor shivered and tried not to concentrate on the fact that he was on a rather small boat, floating on a loch that was big enough to hide a whole shoal of monsters. He had never been a good sailor, nor a strong swimmer, and he’d tried very hard to persuade Cutter to let him stay on shore.

But Cutter was having none of it. He seemed to be holding a bit of a grudge about being dragged into this ‘mad escapade’, as he termed it, by Claudia, and was therefore making sure that everybody else suffered as much as he did.

It didn’t help that they’d woken up that morning to find Loch Ness completely covered in fog. This meant that they couldn’t see more than thirty feet in front of the boat, and so were having to be very careful about keeping a look-out for obstacles.  Not to mention the fact that in this kind of weather anything could sneak up on them practically unnoticed.

Stephen seemed to have had the same idea, as he was prowling the deck with his dart gun, peering continuously into the fog. Abby was helping Cutter set up the sonar equipment, while Claudia was in the small cabin steering the boat – apparently she had been taken on lots of boating holidays when she was a kid, and so had experience. Connor himself was supposed to be double-checking his database on his laptop to make sure they’d correctly identified what the ‘monster’ might be. But he was already as certain as he could be, so he’d put the computer away, and was staring into the fog like Stephen, reasoning that two pairs of eyes had to be better than one.

He felt like the fog was smothering him slightly. Tentatively, he whistled a few bars of _The Family Ness_ theme tune, but the noise sounded muffled as it floated away into the mist. Definitely no chance of attracting Nessie that way.

Cutter finally finished fiddling with the sonar equipment, and Abby carefully lowered the speaker over the side and into the water. They’d worked out a logical ‘scale’ of sonar frequencies to try, and Cutter and Claudia had plotted out the best route to cover as much of the loch as they could in the shortest distance. Now all they had to do was see if they attracted anything.

So they waited. And waited. And waited. Claudia, Abby, and Cutter took turns steering the boat around the loch, while Stephen and Connor continued keeping a look-out.

But after a few hours it was becoming apparent that everyone was starting to agree with Cutter – they were on a wild goose chase. Even Connor was privately wondering whether they were going to find anything. He’d told Cutter his conspiracy theory about the Loch Ness Monster having been dead for ages at their very first meeting, and he was beginning to think that it might be more than just a theory. Either that, or there really was nothing here to find, and there never had been.

He was just considering firing up his laptop again for a game or two of Minesweeper when Stephen’s startled whisper reached him.

“Connor!”

“What?” Connor looked up, annoyed, figuring he was about to be teased about the lack of monster.

Stephen didn’t reply, but instead jerked his head at a point behind Connor’s left shoulder. Slowly, Connor turned around…and felt his jaw dropping.

No more than fifteen feet from the side of the boat the long, graceful neck of a plesiosaur was curving upwards, ending in a small head with rather large eyes – eyes that were regarding Connor and Stephen steadily, and with a hint of curiosity. The creature towered over the boat, and Connor had to tilt his head back to look up at it, contemplating at the same time how big the entire animal must be.

“What do we do?” hissed Stephen quietly.

“You’re asking _me_?” Connor whispered back. He wasn’t really getting any sense of threat from the plesiosaur, despite its size, although he hoped Stephen wouldn’t think that shooting it was a good idea – who knew how the creature would react to having a dart gun aimed at it.

“Oh my god.” Cutter had appeared on deck, closely followed by Claudia and Abby, who both gasped at the sight of the plesiosaur. 

“It just appeared on the sonar readout,” Cutter continued. “One minute, nothing, then it was just…there. We must be right on top of the anomaly. There’s no other explanation.”

Everyone’s eyes were riveted to the plesiosaur, and no one seemed to quite know what to do next.

“Well, I guess this proves all the stories are true,” muttered Claudia quietly. “The anomaly must have been coming and going for years, considering how long people have been claiming to see the monster.”

There was a faint splash from the other side of the boat, followed by the distinct click of the safety being released on Stephen’s dart gun.

“Er, guys…”

As a group they all swung round. There were two more plesiosaurs on the other side of the boat, both slightly smaller than the first one, but still more than large enough to give everyone a crick in the neck. And as they gaped at these two new arrivals, yet another head appeared at the stern of the boat, followed by one at the bow. They were surrounded.

“What do we do?” said Stephen again, hefting his dart gun.

“I don’t think they’re any danger to us,” said Connor, surprising everyone. “I mean, look at them. They’re just curious. If they’d wanted to eat us, they would have done so already. Besides, look at the size of those heads. They’re tiny in comparison to the rest of their bodies – they probably couldn’t eat us even if they tried. I reckon their diet consists mainly of fish.”

“I think you’re right,” agreed Cutter. “They’ve been attracted through the anomaly by the sonar, and they just want to investigate this strange foreign object. If we turn the sonar off, they’ll probably lose interest.”

He nodded at Abby, who slid back inside the cabin, emerging again seconds later to nod back at Cutter.

“Claudia, try moving the boat forward slowly,” said Cutter. “Not too fast – we don’t want to hit one of them by accident.”

After a couple of moments the boat began to chug forward slowly. The plesiosaur at the bow moved out of the way slightly as the vessel passed, and then joined the other four, who were now all following along in the boat’s wake.

“Er, what do we do if they don’t lose interest?” Abby asked nervously. She was amazed by the presence of the creatures but, unlike Rex, felt no desire to adopt any of them. Quite apart from anything else, they wouldn’t fit inside her flat.

“Just give it some time,” Cutter answered.

Connor hoped they wouldn’t leave too swiftly. He had hurriedly powered up his laptop again, and was frantically typing all his observations about the plesiosaurs into his dino database. He knew that seeing the _actual_ Loch Ness Monster – several of them, in fact – was going to go down in his top ten experiences of all time. And that was saying something, considering the extraordinary turn his life had taken over the last few months.

Eventually, however, the plesiosaurs seemed to become bored of following the boat. Without the sonar, or indeed any promise of food, to keep them interested, they apparently decided it was time to go home. One by one the long necks slid back into the water, until the boat was left alone again in the by-now thinning fog.

Connor sighed and closed his laptop. “That was fantastic!” he said fervently.

“Yes, it was,” agreed Abby.

Even Cutter and Stephen smiled with enthusiasm, and Claudia could be heard whistling _The Family Ness_ as she steered the boat back towards the shore.


End file.
